For a year, Fairfax conservatives told you exactly who Abigail Spanberger would be in office. This weekend, USA Today caught up.

In her April 12 column, opinion writer Nicole Russell reached for the same phrase Fairfax activists have been using since January: credibility gap. Two months in, Spanberger is already underwater. The Washington Post/Schar School poll has her at 47 percent approve, 46 percent disapprove — support down by double digits from her Election Night margin. That is not a honeymoon wearing off. That is voters realizing they were sold one candidate and handed another.

Campaign one way. Govern the other. That is the whole game.

Look at the receipts from her first ten weeks.

She reversed Virginia’s state cooperation with federal immigration enforcement — the same cooperation she spent last summer telling suburban voters she would preserve. She rejoined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the carbon tax scheme Virginia families pay for every time they turn on the lights. And she has signaled she will sign whatever new gun control bill Richmond Democrats drop on her desk.

None of that was on the campaign flyer she mailed to Fairfax.

State Senator Mark Obenshain, a Republican, put it plainly in Russell’s column: Assembly Democrats “have rolled out to her some of the most liberal bills that they have generated in my time in the General Assembly.” That is the quiet part. She ran as a guardrail. She is governing as a rubber stamp.

And she is not doing it alone.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell (SD-34) is running the floor in Richmond. Lieutenant Governor Ghazala Hashmi presides over his chamber. Attorney General Jay Jones is the enforcement arm. Speaker Don Scott sets the agenda on the House side. Every one of them ran on “reasonable.” Every one of them is governing on “radical.” This is what one-party rule in Richmond actually looks like — not a debate, a pipeline. Bills go in one end. Your wallet, your schools, and your rights come out the other.

The national numbers are moving with the voters who feel it.

CNN’s Harry Enten, hardly a conservative, notes that Democrats are underperforming every historical midterm benchmark and that Republicans now lead on net favorability by five points. Enten is predicting Republicans hold the Senate in 2026. That is not a forecast about Mitch McConnell. That is a verdict on Abigail Spanberger and every Democrat who sold voters a moderate and delivered a progressive.

Virginians are not stupid. We watched this movie in Richmond last winter. We are watching the sequel right now.

And here is where it gets local.

Every bill Spanberger signs lands on a Fairfax kitchen table. RGGI is on your Dominion bill. The immigration reversal means Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano and Sheriff Stacey Kincaid now have statewide cover for the sanctuary policies that have already cost Fairfax families. The gun control package will not disarm a single cartel — it will disarm the mother in Herndon who bought a pistol after her neighbor’s car got broken into for the third time.

Spanberger cannot run for re-election. Virginia governors are one-term by law. So she does not have to answer to voters in 2029 for any of it. That is exactly why the next move matters so much.

Because the next bait-and-switch is already on your ballot.

On Tuesday, April 21, 2026 — six days from now — Fairfax voters decide the redistricting referendum. Listen carefully to how Spanberger, Surovell, and Speaker Don Scott are selling it. “Fair maps.” “Modernization.” “Good government.” It is the exact same vocabulary she used on the campaign trail last fall. And it means the exact same thing it meant then: trust us, we will be reasonable.

They will not be reasonable. They will draw the lines themselves. They will lock in Democrat control of Virginia’s congressional delegation for a decade. And the next time a Spanberger-style candidate promises Fairfax voters she will govern from the middle, there will be no competitive seat left to hold her to it.

Russell’s column is a late warning. The poll is the evidence. The referendum is the test.

Do not fail it.

Vote NO on the redistricting referendum on Tuesday, April 21, 2026. Bring your spouse. Bring your neighbors. Bring the coworker who told you last November that Spanberger “seemed reasonable” — they need to see what reasonable looks like ten weeks in. This is the vote that tells Spanberger, Surovell, and Don Scott that Fairfax is done being lied to. Six days. One ballot. Vote NO.

Nicole Russell makes the fuller case in her April 12 USA Today column. Read it here.